Poll Finds Support for Vouchers Wanes if Public Schools Affected

Although the public appears to be equally divided over school
vouchers, backing for the idea wanes as supporters are told that
vouchers could decrease funding for public schools, a national poll
released last week says.

Officials of the National School Boards Association said they
commissioned the poll to look more closely at opinions on vouchers
beyond how many people back the school choice option and how many do
not. The NSBA opposes the use of public money for vouchers to send
students to private schools.

Zogby International, a Utica, N.Y.-based pollster, interviewed 1,211
adults by telephone in May, including an oversample of 301
African-Americans. The margin of error overall is plus or minus 3
percentage points, and 5.7 percentage points for the African-Americans
sampled.

Equal proportions of the people polled, or 48 percent, said they
opposed and supported vouchers. But the poll found that those who
"strongly oppose" vouchers (32 percent) outpaced those who "strongly
favor" the option (24 percent).

For the African-Americans surveyed, 41 percent "strongly oppose"
vouchers, more than double the 19 percent who said they "strongly
favor" them.

With an issue like vouchers, which has split people in past surveys,
those with "greater intensity" about the topic are more likely to vote
and work harder to press their case, said John J. Zogby, the president
and chief operating officer of Zogby International.

To Marc Egan, the director of the NSBA's voucher-strategy center,
the poll's results suggest that support for vouchers is "paper thin."
Especially, he added, when those in favor consider the negative impact
voucher programs could have on tax revenues targeted for public
schools.

Of the voucher supporters surveyed, 39 percent said they would
withdraw their support if the program would result in the loss of
public school tax dollars.

Among supporters and opponents alike, the poll found that 80 percent
to 90 percent of the respondents wanted private schools that accept
vouchers to be held publicly accountable for academic standards,
admission requirements, financial disclosure, and test scores.

Those polling results put voucher supporters in a bind, Mr. Egan
contended. People are weighing what vouchers would mean for their own
children as well as their impact on the community as a whole, he
said.

"What [voucher advocates] are proposing time and again is clearly
not popular with the public," he said, noting that voters in Michigan
and California soundly rejected voucher initiatives in their states
last year.

Distorting Facts?

Clark Neily, a staff lawyer with the Institute for Justice,
countered that the poll fails to capture the feelings of parents whose
children attend low-performing schools and would benefit most from
tuition vouchers to send students to private schools. The
Washington-based legal-advocacy group represents families participating
in the Cleveland and Milwaukee voucher programs.

The poll showed that 57 percent of African-Americans with children
under the age of 17 backed vouchers. But 55 percent of those
respondents said they would withdraw their support if vouchers resulted
in public schools' losing tax revenue.

Mr. Neily called the decrease of tax dollars for public schools a
"distortion of the facts," arguing that most voucher programs spend
less money per student than the public schools.

For a more balanced picture, he said, the people surveyed also
should have been asked if they would rather spend their tax dollars on
"unsafe public schools" that had made little progress in teaching
children, or spend the money for vouchers to send students to private
schools.

The U.S. Supreme Court's agreement last week to hear a case testing
whether publicly funded vouchers can be used at religious schools in
Cleveland also will shift the debate from a legal question to a focus
on the program's benefits, Mr. Neily suggested.

Although the Alexandria, Va.- based NSBA believes that the poll puts
the burden on voucher supporters to prove such programs' value, Mr.
Neily disagreed. "The pressure is on [voucher opponents] to tell a
parent whose child is trapped in a failing school why they should not
use a voucher," he contended.

"[Voucher advocates] do represent an appealing and understandable
core value," Mr. Zogby, the pollster, said. "But when a broad range of
other values are considered in all of this, they are kind of swimming
upstream."

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